No More Mr Nice Guy
People say that I used to be nice. Sure, I was nice for a few years, but it didn't get any better results from those same people who now complain that I am no longer nice. You be nice to them, you get crap results. You be less forgiving and more authoritative with them, you get the same crap results. It's a lose-lose situation with crap as the result. What can I do about this? Be nice? People just walk all over you. Be not so nice? People complain because they can no longer walk all over you. The spoilt brats who get their own way most of the time now have someone who is tired of taking their shit. The result of all this is a bit of conflict.
It used to be the case that if you wanted to implement a new way of doing things, you would write up a proposal and submit that to your peers for discussion and feedback. Well, that's the way it should be done, and is the way it is done in companies that have more structure and discipline with their staff. Getting things done the way you would like them is now a case of keeping it to yourself, implementing it, then start using it. Don't ask for feedback because all you will get is criticism and knee-jerk reactions without any thought or study gone into the response. If you do it yourself and start using it on your own project, then you can possibly show some of your peers the working results. This happened with a scripting solution that I was working on. While my peers were arguing back and forth over which scripting solution they could use, without having actually set out what they really wanted to do with it, I went off on my own and created a solution that does exactly what my project required it to do. Now some of those other leads are using my solution in their projects because it does the job they need it to do. So now when I want to do something new, I say "fuck 'em" and I go off to do it myself. This way it actually gets done, or it ends up in one of those dreary meetings where the same players argue their way around a huge circle and up getting absolutely nowhere. They do not even have the common courtesy to let one person talk at a time. There will usually be three conversations going at the same time because they're simply rude and obnoxious. That's the point where you just want to get up and leave the room.
During some of those 'discussions' mentioned above, I often see that as a company we are quite often re-inventing the wheel. There might be viable solutions available out there, more often than not they are also free, but because they were not written in-house or they do not cost thousands of dollars from some over-priced big name company, they are considered to be of dubious quality without even a cursory glance at the proposed solution. When we do re-invent the wheel, which is most of the time, we are almost guaranteed to end up with a second-rate solution anyway that takes many iterations just to get to a workable state.
We still have the assistant producer who redesigns the game without consulting the designer, and gets upset when the designer tries to get some of his design in the game, which the designer has to do by going straight to the developers. See previous rant "Who Designs These Things Anyway".
It used to be the case that if you wanted to implement a new way of doing things, you would write up a proposal and submit that to your peers for discussion and feedback. Well, that's the way it should be done, and is the way it is done in companies that have more structure and discipline with their staff. Getting things done the way you would like them is now a case of keeping it to yourself, implementing it, then start using it. Don't ask for feedback because all you will get is criticism and knee-jerk reactions without any thought or study gone into the response. If you do it yourself and start using it on your own project, then you can possibly show some of your peers the working results. This happened with a scripting solution that I was working on. While my peers were arguing back and forth over which scripting solution they could use, without having actually set out what they really wanted to do with it, I went off on my own and created a solution that does exactly what my project required it to do. Now some of those other leads are using my solution in their projects because it does the job they need it to do. So now when I want to do something new, I say "fuck 'em" and I go off to do it myself. This way it actually gets done, or it ends up in one of those dreary meetings where the same players argue their way around a huge circle and up getting absolutely nowhere. They do not even have the common courtesy to let one person talk at a time. There will usually be three conversations going at the same time because they're simply rude and obnoxious. That's the point where you just want to get up and leave the room.
During some of those 'discussions' mentioned above, I often see that as a company we are quite often re-inventing the wheel. There might be viable solutions available out there, more often than not they are also free, but because they were not written in-house or they do not cost thousands of dollars from some over-priced big name company, they are considered to be of dubious quality without even a cursory glance at the proposed solution. When we do re-invent the wheel, which is most of the time, we are almost guaranteed to end up with a second-rate solution anyway that takes many iterations just to get to a workable state.
We still have the assistant producer who redesigns the game without consulting the designer, and gets upset when the designer tries to get some of his design in the game, which the designer has to do by going straight to the developers. See previous rant "Who Designs These Things Anyway".
posted by Steve at 9:07 pm
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